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By Root 2372 0

his arrest. He had come to Paris in good faith and with German assurances to preside over the National Assembly. Now, he was being linked to the Vichy government, whose actions he had always opposed. He demanded not to be sent to Germany. ‘Abetz looked very much embarrassed, ’ Josée recalled, ‘as he had just received orders to the contrary and had so notified Herriot before the luncheon.’ While the conversation proceeded, more armed Gestapo guards surrounded the Hôtel Matignon. Jeanne Laval appealed to Abetz, ‘Mr. Ambassador, this departure, under these conditions, is an outrage. See for yourself the painful situation it puts us all in.’ Herriot interjected, ‘Please, listen to her, Mr. Ambassador. This is the voice of France.’ Jeanne Laval said it was significant that her husband and Herriot, old political opponents, had come together. ‘You cannot condone an action that would make it appear as if my husband had instigated unscrupulous tactics resulting in Monsieur Herriot’s being forced to undergo the same fate as ours, under duress.’ The lunch party lingered till after four o’clock, making small talk, in Josée’s words, ‘anecdotes and reminiscences–the Duke of Windsor, Anthony Eden, the League of Nations, the Ethiopian crisis, etc.’. At four thirty, Abetz took the Herriots back to the Hôtel de Ville under arrest.

René followed his wife and her father upstairs to the Lavals’ apartment. Josée, near tears, told her father, ‘I’ll go alone with you.’ When René heard his wife offer to accompany him to Germany, he said, ‘I’ll go too.’ Laval gave René what he called a ‘heavy look’, and Josée backed down. ‘Alors,’ she said, ‘I’ll stay in Paris.’

René and Josée returned home to the Place du Palais Bourbon, but René went out again on the pretext of bringing Herriot some cigars and books. It was five thirty when he drove up to the Hôtel de Ville. The Prefect of the Seine led him past Gestapo guards to Herriot’s quarters. René offered the old man an escape route. He whispered, ‘There is a side exit that is not watched, and I propose, with the prefect’s agreement, that you escape with me through the sewers. I will hide you in Passy in a little flat that an American let me have in case of need.’ The American was his friend Seymour Weller, who ran Bordeaux’s famed Château Haut-Brion vineyards and had avoided German internment through various ruses to remain in Paris. While René waited for an answer, Herriot ‘alternately raised and lowered his right and left hands, as if weighing the pros and cons’. Coming to a decision, he said to René in a low voice, ‘I must follow my fate.’ He then embraced René, who left disappointed.

When all her guests had left the long lunch, Jeanne Laval called Clara de Chambrun. Pierre, she said, had been arrested and was about to be deported. She refused to be separated from her husband and would accompany him to Germany. ‘I hurried to Matignon,’ Clara wrote, ‘where I found her, as always in moments of calamity, in complete possession of her presence of mind and will, and of that extraordinary psychic power of divination which is almost like second sight.’ Jeanne Laval worried about the children, René and Josée. When the Resistance came into the open, it would keep its promise to deal with collaborators. She urged Clara, ‘They must get to the country and work with their hands, for Josée cannot live and think without her father and without me. We three have always formed one unity.’ Clara recalled, ‘She knew that I would never see her husband again and begged me to ask the General to come from the hospital that night to say farewell.’

Clara left through the courtyard, passing a throng of prefects, presidents of municipal councils, chiefs of police and mayors of the Paris region, who had come to see Laval. Laval issued them a letter requesting their support for two prefects, René Bouffet and Amédée Bussière, ‘in whose hands I am placing the fate of Paris’. Clara waited at home in the rue de Vaugirard for Aldebert. He arrived from Neuilly just after nine o’clock, and they went together to the Hôtel Matignon.